


Bone Black

by whistlejacket



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-14
Updated: 2014-03-14
Packaged: 2018-01-15 17:55:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,499
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1313905
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/whistlejacket/pseuds/whistlejacket
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A spell, a thousand quills pressing down from the heavens, and an ending only certain folk wish for.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Bone Black

**S*S**

Antelope bones fell with a soft clink into the pot over the fire. Now began the long process of burning them until they turned black and crumbled. Even then, he wouldn’t be finished. Hours of crushing the blackened bones by hand lay ahead. His only tools: an iron pot and a stone pestle. He must pulverize the powder until it was finer than sand. Only then would the transmogrified bones become the proper catalytic agent; only then would they become imbued with the wizard’s own aura.

Only then could he turn the ingredient into what he needed to transform himself.

 

**H*G**

The sofa on the upper tier had been placed beneath a dome of windows. On clear winter nights, one could lie on one’s back and comfortably watch the stars travel by; it was much like being in a car and not having to drive, just quietly watching the world pass.

It cleared her mind, for the space of minutes or hours, and the Headmistress’ mind was a very cluttered place these days. Major problems were few and far between, thankfully, but it was really the minutiae of running a school that could completely exhaust one.

And then there was Severus.

 

**S*S**

Severus gave the crumbling bones a turn with the steel spoon. The scraping was a sound to which he had grown accustomed, but the immense heat from the magically banked fire had made the room all but unbearable. He wiped sweat from his eyes, and leaving the spoon on the mantel, he Levitated the cauldron onto an oak table. Donning dragonhide gloves and apron, he pressed the pestle into the bones, twisting his wrists, grinding with a grim determination as the fire behind him settled to a mere wisp of its former self.

The hours passed into aching muscles, grumbling stomach.

 

**H*G**

Hermione finished her evening’s paperwork and took her tea to the sofa above. The stars looked particularly sharp, she thought, like antler tips, or shark teeth. The nib of a quill that has known a precise knife. All those quills, bearing down on her.

She shook her head. The past few weeks, her head had been full of funny thoughts. Doors opening and closing, revealing half-shadows. Pools of black ink on white bed sheets. Once, she’d found herself staring at the empty frame that had “Severus Snape, Headmaster 1997-1998” on a small brass plate beneath.

Her tea had gone cold.

 

**S*S**

“My apologies.” He sat next to her on the sofa. “I was working in the lab.”

“None necessary. Tea?”

 “Please.”

He knew she was watching him as he sipped. He wished he hadn’t come. But she expected him. They had a standing engagement, Tuesday and Friday nights on the upper tier of an office that had never truly been his but was unquestionably hers, now. Tea, and sometimes something stronger. Quiet conversation, loud arguments, her hands that smelled like India ink.

The cup rattled ever so softly as he replaced it in its saucer.

“I can’t stay.”

 

**H*G**

“What do you--”

“Unfinished marking, and a project I’m working on…” 

“Of course; I don’t mean to hold you up. It’s--”

“I should’ve sent a message.” 

“No, no, it’s all right. Are you – are you sure?”

There was a long pause before he answered.

Too long.

“I’m sure.”

She stood, unsteadily putting her stockinged feet back into her shoes. He put out his arm for her; his solidness should’ve been comforting, but it wasn’t. She couldn’t see his eyes, and the universe had tilted. Without looking up, she knew the stars had changed, the pinpricks of light rearranging themselves into something unknown.

 

**S*S**

She walked him to her office door. All the damn way. He cursed every step, her hand still on his arm.

She faced him, eyes moving restlessly over his face, but the old mask had dropped into place. He could tell she knew and was disappointed. He waited for the barrage of questions.

Instead, she said, “Severus, you have been the very best head of Slytherin that your house has ever known. This school is proud to have you.”

For a moment, he faltered. “Hermione--”

“And I – I am proud to know you, and to call you my friend.”

 

**H*G**

He was still; so still, she wasn’t sure if he took a breath. Or, for that matter, if she did.

In a desperate bid to right the stars, she kissed him.

He kissed her back, immediately, and everything in her body rushed, rushed, flung itself skyward and pressed on the dome of the heavens, until he slowly broke away from her and drew her back to earth, a hand light on her elbow.

“And I,” he started, cleared his throat, and began again, “I am an old man who--”

“Who loves an old woman?” she whispered.

“Yes.”

 

**S*S**

The rotating staircase stopped, and he stumbled into the corridor. _One kiss_ , he chided himself, _one kiss and you behave like a schoolboy_. It was chaos within his body and mind. Delicious chaos, and yet…

And yet. There was a small cauldron in his chambers, containing the device of his death and immortality both. If he waited much longer, time would exact its own price on his body, and the choice would be removed. He could let his life spin out naturally, the fibers already fraying as they neared their end.

One hundred and thirty-seven was admirable – but not enough.

 

**H*G**

Hermione slipped beneath pristine covers, settling her head uneasily on the pillow. On the bedside table, a single candle burned. She stared at the flickering light, thinking about the evening. She and Severus had maintained a friendship for a very long time now, a friendship that made others talk, and yet, had never passed into the realm of the physical. It was a regret she had harbored, but that had all seemed to change in the space of a moment.

But that was not what caused her restlessness now.

Her eyes closed, and a scent like distant bonfires enveloped her.

 

**S*S**

Once the door was locked, he single-mindedly began his task. Disrobing, he settled himself on the bed, duvet pushed aside. A ceramic cauldron hovered close by, and seven quills were laid out, sharpened for use. On the bedside table, an open book, pages blank and begging to be filled.

He picked up the first quill, dipped it in the cauldron, and carefully scraped the excess ink away. Beginning on the bottom of his foot, he inscribed a rune. It did not escape him that he was, again, being marked. 

Hopefully, he had learned a thing or two since the last time.

 

**H*G**

Hermione dreamed of rivers, black, black rivers. They were wide and rushing somewhere she couldn’t see, but she paced the banks, fighting a desire to wade in and be swept away. When she put a foot in the water, it was warm, and her foot came away as black as the river.

She stepped back, breathing hard.

“It’s only ink.”

She knew who pulled her hair back and whispered this into the nape of her neck, and she shivered.

He bent down, dipping a pale hand in the current, and drew long fingers up her bare leg, leaving black streaks like feathers.

 

**S*S**

It was nearly morning; he could feel the creeping dawn, even beneath the weight of dungeon stones. In the wardrobe mirror, he watched his reflection meticulously draw the last symbols across his face. After the final rune was drawn, he paused, dropped the seventh quill to the floor, and returned to bed.

As he crawled onto the duvet, his feet quietly vanished. Knees were gone as he laid himself down. He noted that there was no sensation but one of lightness; whether merely corporeal or one of spirit, it did not matter. 

He stared at the book, thinking of Hermione.

 

**H*G**

When she awoke, morning light filtered through the cracks in the curtain, making shadows of the bedclothes. She reached out and touched a hump of duvet. It deflated under her fingertips. No one slept beside her.

She sat up, stomach in knots, and though she might normally dismiss such feelings as the lingering effects of a bad dream, she knew without reason that _something_ had happened. 

A teaching robe was haphazardly thrown on over her nightgown. Stuffing her feet into shoes, she hurried from the room, tossing powder into the Floo and calling for Severus in his quarters. He did not answer.

 

**H*G**

It had been tempting to stay on that bed, rubbing her face into the sheets. 

First, she had searched his rooms, even peered into his wardrobe. Then she had sat in the middle of his bed, confused by the quills, the small cauldron with inky residue at the

bottom. Finally, she had curled up, wanting to cry but feeling no tears coming.

She listened for his boots.

When she rose at last, her face and hands bore black smudges. She made sure his room was secure, and paused in front of the Floo to scowl at the empty space.

“You bastard. What have you done now?”

 

**H*G**

Whispers everywhere that Professor Snape had not appeared in his portrait frame, that an artist had been contacted and was unable to paint one. The Headmistress refused to look at it, knowing that the former Headmasters watched her. Rumors swirled of his time as Headmaster, that the castle refused to recognize him, despite his ultimate acquittal. Perhaps, it was said, he wasn’t truly the heroic figure, but a despicable criminal after all. Judgment had been rendered.

In her room, candles out, she hit the walls and healed her fists. She crept in the dark to his room and begged him to show himself. She cried onto black-stained sheets. It was a vigil of one.

 

**H*G**

On a Tuesday night, three months from the official Auror report that Severus Snape absolutely could not be located and six days since Minerva’s portrait had suggested, kindly, that the Headmistress get away for the holidays and slightly less than six days since the Headmistress had told Minerva to turn into a cat and lick her own arse, Hermione Granger took her tea to the upper tier, removed her shoes, and reclined on the sofa.

The stars were still there, their pinpricks of light upon her heart unwanted, and so she turned on her side and was jabbed in the ribs by a book.

 

**H*G**

Its cover was black and dusty. There was no gilt lettering on the spine, no title at all on the cover plate. The pages were rich, smooth parchment, marked by age. A tiny silverfish ran out and became a white moth that flew to the glass panes above.

She was a clever girl. This could be dark magic.

The spine creaked as she opened it fully, pages fluttering.

She stuck her nose in.

It smelled like…

Writing began to fill the pages.

Faster, faster, spiky handwriting in a secret language running across the pages, pages turning on their own, as if the author had an urgent need to _tell_.

Hermione was a master of hermeneutics. And she loved a good mystery.

And her instincts were almost never wrong.

 

**H*G**

 

She started at the beginning. And here is how it began:

_Dear Hermione,_

And as she read, a finger on the page touched wet ink: her fingerprint, his words. Each whorl pulling the essence, her hands turning the pages to read more and suffering the slightest of paper cuts.

And that was not where it began at all, she realized. Decades of longing seeped into her skin, messages that had thrummed through her blood gave voice, and she lifted her head only when the last star in the sky faded into pink dawn, and the book was completely blank.

The last section had been a spell. First ingredient: antelope bones.

 

**H*G S*S**

 

The castle had no need for portraits. A second empty frame meant nothing.

It had no need of rumors, either. Everything it knew was in its crenellations, its forgotten corridors, its towers and its seeping, damp dungeons.

It had no heart, but if it had one, it might have chosen the Library. It was there, on the cusp of each night, on a shelf overlooked, in a section nameless, the first pinpricks of stars grew in the sky and sent their light through a certain rectangular window.

And with the grace of the heavens, in the bosom of their home, one book on this lonely, unnoticed shelf leaned against another, their pages blank but speaking volumes to one another in the precise immortality only certain folk ever wish for.

 

  

**Epilogue:**

 

No one kept vigil for the Headmistress’ portrait. But the whispers and rumors, as ever, abounded: cauldron by her bed with a strange black residue, and the quills—well, she had written over fifty-seven books, true, but wasn’t this all a bit reminiscent of how a certain professor had vanished?

Other than that, the life of Hermione Granger left little to remark upon. Sad, some said. Only one left of the Golden Trio now, the last true War Hero.

Beyond the realm of childhood friendships and animosities, beyond old fears and forgotten heroics, in between a few decades of bickering couched by more years of things unsaid, there was a place in the Library where no one looked, for the books there were most boring and staid. And besides, spells placed there thirty years previous made them invisible.

But even here, rumors drifted in of young blood: a Longbottom grandson, Gryffindor and with the fire of ten Blacks and twelve Potters burning in his blood, but also with the intellect and moral compass of one Granger, and enough compassion in him to account twice-over for his Lovegood grandmother.

The pages on the shelf shuddered.

“They’ve put a madman in the Headmaster’s chair.”

 The book next to it quivered with delight. “Think of all the great things he will accomplish! I hardly had the energy those last forty years.”

“You had the energy to place me on probation twice, not to mention all that cheating at chess.”

“Sore loser. I never cheated, and you know it. As for probation, I tried to warn you. Sometimes, you did get a bit carried away with the points deduction.”

“That was one occasion. The Gryffindors were a terrible lot that year, ruffians and hooligans, all of them, and I was the only one to stand up to them. The second, as I recall, was for merely--”

“Shush! The stars are coming out.”

Miraculously, he did as told. Both waited as the rectangular window filled with moonlight, and then the light of the stars – their stars – swung upon them, darting across their covers. One book leaned against the other and sighed contentedly, though which one, I shall never tell.

 

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> A/N: I intended to write this strictly as a series of drabbles (100 words each) but cheated, failed and was otherwise irresponsible.
> 
> I hope you enjoyed.


End file.
